Continuing the series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.
The story of Nosferatu takes place in 1838 – nearly sixty years before the publication of its source text, Dracula – and so places it vampire in an era of the dark Romantic that was already long gone. Vampires, the film implies, are denizens of remote mountain ranges in the distant past; this belies the fact that, by the time the film was released in 1922, vampires had been spreading beyond their traditional boundaries.
For proof, look no further than George Sylvester Viereck’s 1907 novella The House of the Vampire. To start with, the story bears witness to a geographical spread: its author was born in Germany, but had since moved to America. His vampire, meanwhile, lives not in the Europe of tradition but in the United States. Specifically, he resides in twentieth-century New York, demonstrating a spread across time as well as space: no being of age-old folklore, this vampire is a thoroughly modern sort.
Still another attribute to have shifted is the basic concept of what a vampire is. Viereck’s vampire feeds not on blood, but on something less tangible…
The novella centres on Reginald Clarke, a charismatic author who has won the fascinated admiration of a young poet named Ernest Fielding. The latter is eager to present his writing to the man he reveres – or, as the novella has it, “to bring the day’s harvest to Clarke, as a worshipper scattering precious stones, incense and tapestries at the feet of a god.” It is not only Ernest who views Clarke as a godlike being – Clarke freely compares himself to the literary deities Shakespeare and Balzac:
Clarke was gazing abstractedly at the bust of Balzac.
“A man’s genius is commensurate with his ability of absorbing from life the elements essential to his artistic completion. Balzac possessed this power in a remarkable degree. But, strange to say, it was evil that attracted him most. He absorbed it as a sponge absorbs water; perhaps because there was so little of it in his own make-up. He must have purified the atmosphere around him for miles, by bringing all the evil that was floating in the air or slumbering in men’s souls to the point of his pen.
“And he”—his eyes were resting on Shakespeare’s features as a man might look upon the face of a brother—”he, too, was such a nature. In fact, he was the most perfect type of the artist. Nothing escaped his mind. From life and from books he drew his material, each time reshaping it with a master-hand. Creation is a divine prerogative. Re-creation, infinitely more wonderful than mere calling into existence, is the prerogative of the poet…”
Ernest soon comes to understand all too well what Clarke means by this talk of literary absorption. He is planning to write a play about a yellow-veiled princess; before he can put pen to paper, however, he is startled to find that Clarke has already written the same play, word for word. Ernest receives support from Ethel Brandenbourg, a woman who was likewise under Clarke’s spell. She was in love with him, yet found her own creative urges as a painter sapped away to nothing in his presence until, finally, he lost interest in her. Clarke would appear to be some sort of psychic leech, draining the imaginations of those around him. In one passage Ethel has a vision that reflects what may be the true form of her sometime lover:
A half-forgotten dream, struggling to consciousness, staggered her by its vividness. She saw Clarke as she had seen him in days gone by, grotesquely transformed into a slimy sea-thing, whose hungry mouths shut sucking upon her and whose thousand tentacles encircled her form. She closed her eyes in horror at the reminiscence. And in that moment it became clear to her that she must take into her hands the salvation of Ernest Fielding from the clutches of the malign power that had mysteriously enveloped his life.
Eventually, Ethel presents Ernest with a theory that Clarke is a vampire:
“Surely,” she answered, “you must know that in the legends of every nation we read of men and women who were called vampires. They are beings, not always wholly evil, whom every night some mysterious impulse leads to steal into unguarded bedchambers, to suck the blood of the sleepers and then, having waxed strong on the life of their victims, cautiously to retreat. Thence comes it that their lips are very red. It is even said that they can find no rest in the grave, but return to their former haunts long after they are believed to be dead. Those whom they visit, however, pine away for no apparent reason. The physicians shake their wise heads and speak of consumption. But sometimes, ancient chronicles assure us, the people’s suspicions were aroused, and under the leadership of a good priest they went in solemn procession to the graves of the persons suspected. And on opening the tombs it was found that their coffins had rotted away and the flowers in their hair were black. But their bodies were white and whole; through no empty sockets crept the vermin, and their sucking lips were still moist with a little blood.”
Echoing Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing, Ethel uses analogies from modern science to argue that such superstitions may have a basis in fact (“The transmutation of metals seems to-day no longer an idle speculation, and radium has transformed into potential reality the dream of perpetual motion”). Ernest protests that vampires of legend suck blood, but Clarke appears to be preying upon the souls of his victims. “How can a man suck from another man’s brain a thing as intangible, as quintessential as thought?”
“Ah,” replies Ethel, “you forget, thought is more real than blood!”
When Clarke manages to psychically plagiarise another of Ernest’s creative works – this time a novel entitled Leontina – the young poet concludes that Ethel was correct and that the house of Clarke is the house of a vampire. Although some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena surrounding Clarke turn out to be mundane (his materialisation in Ernest’s bedroom is achieved via a hidden passage, for example) his ability to leech the imaginations of those around him appears to be genuine. When Ernest confronts him, Clarke does not so much confess as boast:
“By what right,” he cried, “do you assume that you are the literary Messiah? Who appointed you? What divine power has made you the steward of my mite and of theirs whom you have robbed?”
“I am a light-bearer. I tread the high hills of mankind … I point the way to the future. I light up the abysses of the past. Were not my stature gigantic, how could I hold the torch in all men’s sight? The very souls that I tread underfoot realise, as their dying gaze follows me, the possibilities with which the future is big…. Eternally secure, I carry the essence of what is cosmic … of what is divine…. I am Homer … Goethe … Shakespeare…. I am an embodiment of the same force of which Alexander, Cæsar, Confucius and the Christos were also embodiments…. None so strong as to resist me.”
Viereck was an admirer of Oscar Wilde, whose influence is on full show in The House of the Vampire. The novella is scattered with specimens of Wildean observational humour: when Ernest courts Ethel, the latter bears “the half-amused smile with which the Eve near thirty receives the homage of a boy” while the former wonders if he is acting out of “the irresistible desire to be petted which young poets share with domesticated cats.” Elsewhere, Clarke states that “the most important item in a great poet’s biography is an exact reproduction of his menu […] I ascribe the staleness of American poetry to the griddle-cakes of our Puritan ancestors.”
In one passage, Clarke credits Shakespeare with capturing “the mysterious loveliness of Mr. W.H.” This refers to Shakespeare’s sonnets – which were dedicated to an individual identified only by those initials – and may also be an allusion to Wilde’s story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” which details an attempt to identify this personage. The clearest comparison point within Wilde’s oeuvre, however, is The Picture of Dorian Gray.
One character, Walham, declares that “the seemingly most harmless books may secretly possess the power of scattering in young minds the seed of corruption”, evoking the manner in which Wilde’s protagonist was corrupted by a salacious text, while Reginald Clarke feels like a combination of the late-stage Dorian Gray and his corrupting influence Lord Henry Wotton. The novella even borrows Wilde’s motif of the changed painting, Ernest examining a portrait of Clarke and seeing it alter before his eyes:
There was no trace of malice in this face, the face of a prophet or an inspired madman, a poet. And yet, as he scrutinised the picture closely a curious transformation seemed to take place in the features; a sly little line appeared insinuatingly about Reginald’s well-formed mouth, and the serene calm of his Jupiter-head seemed to turn into the sneak smile of a thief.
(As an aside, it is not too hard to read some of Wilde’s sexual interests into Viereck’s story. In one scene Ernest explains that he was attracted to his friend Jack for being “more feminine, perhaps, than the rest of my college-mates”, to which Clarke replies that Jack’s “lashes are those of a girl”).
The plot reaches a memorable climax as Ernest goes up against Clarke and comes off worst, his fictional characters appearing around him as his very imagination is sucked from his mind. Yet somehow, The House of the Vampire never really entered the canon of vampire literature. The novella may show that the vampire genre was spreading into new shapes – but it also demonstrates how some of those shapes were more solid than others.
The weaknesses of the story are easy to point out. Its debt to Oscar Wilde is a little too clear for it to stand on its own feet, and its conception of a vampire who feeds upon ideas rather than blood was perhaps a little too abstract for many readers. But it is likely that the novella also suffered from the damaged reputation of its author. George Sylvester Viereck would become a Nazi sympathiser, interviewing Hitler in 1923, allegedly collaborating with Goebbels to publish propaganda for the Third Reich in America, and eventually being imprisoned in 1942 for his activities as a German agent.
Between his habit of borrowing from other writers and his aspiration for the status of Übermensch, it would appear that Reginald Clarke reflects something of his creator.
Next: A purportedly true story of vampirism…
